Wesley's Tool-Box

I've been oscillating between Mac mini and iMac for the past two decades for server use. An iMac 21.5" (2017) took over the job of a Mac mini (2012) for the past five and a half years, and now I'm moving back to Mac mini.

This time, it has an M2 Pro processor that uses the ARM architecture instead of Intel x86. So I took my time in setting everything up from the scratch, which took about three weeks. On the hardware side, I wanted to recreate the integrated look of an iMac, so gathering the necessary components required some time. On the software side, there were some compatibility issues in the server components that needed resolving. Most of them are fixed now, so I moved the server operation to the new system today.

With major tasks at the workplace wrapped up, I decided that the National Foundation Day holiday would be a good time to upgrade the Mac mini server from El Capitan (OS X 10.11) to Sierra (OS X macOS 10.12). For a warm-up, I upgraded the MySQL Server installation from 5.6 to 5.7 before that, but I ran into some weird issues and took about an hour to resolve. After getting MySQL to work again, I made a full system backup and installed Sierra. With the new OS in place, I restored the server configuration and now you see that the website is back in action. iPhone 7 review will resume shortly.

Apple held a big press event yesterday, introducing new products like iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7", while releasing new OS updates - iOS 9.3, watchOS 2.2, tvOS 9.2, and OS X El Capitan 10.11.4. While I have updated iOS and watchOS as soon as possible, including the betas, I had been holding my Mac mini and Macbook Air from getting El Capitan (OS X 10.11) updates, and instead kept using Yosemite (10.10). This was mainly to have the server running stable.

But now I felt that any early kinks in El Capitan had been fixed and it was getting increasingly inconvenient to have the previous version of OS X holding back some new features I could enjoy on my iOS devices. So I decided to take the plunge today. After about an hour of installation and fixing any broken server configurations that the new OS installed had caused, everything is running alright again.